Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

Beautiful big B-52 at Maxwell AFB. Stayed in Chennault room at VIP quarters--there's some old-school WWII history (the "Flying Tigers").

Addressed class of '07, Air War College. Maybe 400 or so.

Was told they just get up and leave if you go over 45-minute mark for break, or just start spontaneously clapping to cut you off.

I went 75, then we broke for 10, then I did 35 mins Q&A, to run 30 mins officially over 90-minute limit. No one left early.

Got a very nice, Class of 07 coin.

Then a completely snafu'd trip home.

Still, very nice time and well worth the trip.

He's got the two top articles. The State of the World article we linked last week and the new The State of the World: Author's Commentary Track. It's a 6500 word, online-only update of the article which, for print's sake, saw its last edit back in February. Check it out.

ARTICLE: Obama the Interventionist, By Robert Kagan, Washington Post, April 29, 2007; Page B07

Great piece on Obama's foreign policy that tells me there's exactly no reason now for any centrist Democrat to prefer McCain to Obama. Ditto for Giuliani versus Obama. Ditto for Clinton versus Obama.

Personally, I don't see much difference between any of the top four now on foreign policy, with just McCain coming off as most belligerent but hardly a hawk that separates himself from the pack.

Strong speech by Obama that makes me feel a whole lot more comfortable with him. They say Samantha Powers is a big influence on him. She wrote the Pulitzer prize-winning book on genocides and our lack of response to them, and once served on his staff, I am told.

Thanks to Jamie Ruehl for sending this.

After speaking at Air War College in Montgomery yesterday, my NWA commuter has mechanicals and leaves way late, meaning I miss last connection to Indy out of Memphis.

Put up in hotel that's at start of FEDEX landing strip here, so roaring jet passes right over room every 90 or so seconds--all night long.

Unreal.

Finally getting home at noon today.

Working hard on July story with Warren. The shturmovshchina has begun!

[Ed: The what?! Tom says: Storming to get a job done. Soviet slang]

ARTICLE: A failure in generalship, By Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, Armed Forces Journal

The actual Yingling article online is well worth reading.

Naturally, I find all the arguments about not adapting in the post-Cold war 1990s to the "lesser includeds" to be very much on-target. Yingling's anger makes me feel glad I stuck to such an aggressive tone in PNM and BFA. I knew the military would catch up in terms of its mid-level officers. The frustration simply had to build and the political moment arrive.

No news to me. I get an earful of this from 04s and 05s after every talk, and I do over a hundred each year.

Difference with this argument is--of course--Yingling's status and career and logical dissatisfaction with all the current gray beards parading their wisdom on cable news nets when they themselves are most responsible for the lack of adaptation across the 1990s. This is a very sore spot for the Bob Scales of this world. They legitimately believe they saved the military after Vietnam (true) and that their solution still holds after Cold War's end (not true).

To say otherwise is to attack their sense of career accomplishment--their very definition of who they are.

And when you do that on-stage, you get guys in their late 50s and early 60s standing up and yelling at you (something that happens to me more and more as the overall mood gets closer and closer to Yingling's level of angry outburst).

Wonder if Scales will call Yingling "crazy" like he routinely refers to me.

I say, God bless him for writing this piece and the journal for publishing it.

And watch Scales more closely the next time he defends Future Combat System as an absolute must.

And then switch him off and listen to Andy Krepenevich instead.

It begins to hurt when the sons turn on the fathers. The civilian pukes can be laughed off for their inherent "cowardice" (i.e., lack of mil service), but how do you dismiss the Yinglings when they finally step up and make the very same arguments?

Thanks to Mike Bowen for sending this.

I have always known my limits as a storyteller. For the life of me, fiction writing is a complete mystery. I love reading it, but I can't write it. I just don't have that narrative capacity.

And it shows when I try to do a reporting piece for Esquire, which Mark Warren inevitably ends up editing me heavily on: basically throwing away a lot of my stuff and forcing me to narrativize more, which I do very slowly and with great, unpleasant effort.

It's basically the difference between where I naturally excel (opinion journalism, Mark calls it) and where I am only so-so (reported journalism or narrative journalism).

And yet I go so many places and see so many privileged things, that's it's hard not to try.

Still, this effort has been a complete BITCH for me, and I'll be reluctant to try again for quite some time.

I am not Robert Kaplan although I can readily see the fun in his work.

Then again, I always feel bad when I'm deep in the bowels of a piece, so certainly I'm just taking this opportunity to whine on a bit while the whining's good.

In the end, it'll be a good piece. The process just lacks the effortlessness of my opinion journalism, which is another way of saying I put in something like 10 times the hours for maybe twice as much money. I have no idea how somebody makes a career working that hard.

Got my royalty statements from Putnam, dated up to last July.

I've sold roughly 90,000 copies of PNM (55k hard and 35k soft). That means I'm close to 80 percent of the way to paying off my advance (called "earning out").

As for BFA, it sold 20,000 copies in its first nine months, which is roughly half of what PNM did in the same time frame. I'm only about 25 percent of the way toward earning out on that book, and it may take quite a long time there, depending on what we see with the paperback. The key will be whether or not BFA eventually picks up the regular school sales like PNM has apparently started doing.

The glass-half-empty thing is to note how long it takes to get beyond your advances.

The glass-half-full thing is to note I've sold about 110,000 books and all four versions seem to be hanging in there reasonably well on Amazon.

Of course, all of this is relative. My first book, a classic academic adaptation of my dissertation, has sold about 500 copies worldwide in the last decade and a half.

I have little idea about sales to date in Japan and Turkey. All I ever heard about Japan was that I sold about 9,000 units in the first six months there. That number could have been sales to stores but not completed sales to readers. Store typically return about 40% of the books they get from publishers back to the same publishers. Still, even if that were the case, I gotta admit I was stunned to even have a book published in another language, much less sell thousands of them.

Why bring all this up?

Well, simple answer is that I got the statement in the mail.

Trickier one is my recognizing that Vol. III needs to be a bigger seller than BFA. Otherwise I fall from the ranks at Putnam, where the standards are amazing high.

Still, I think the key is writing books you feel have never been written and can only be written by you. Once you get to those points and have it in print, you just have to be satisfied--on some level--with that accomplishment and that alone.

I know I have to write Vol. III, which in many ways will be less a follow-on and more a how-to deconstruction of what I believe in serious horizontal thinking. I just feel like that's the next logical step in my evolution: making the process of thought itself a strategically reproducible concept.

I'm confident I can sell it, but I'm certain it needs to be written.

POST: Wal-Mart Recruits Intelligence Officers

Interesting trend that speaks to the spread of security from below--i.e., sub-nationally. This is a great point John Robb makes in his book (which, on scanning so far, seems very good to me), but it's less the dystopian outcome than just a recognizable back-to-the-future outcome. Remember why and when Pinkerton thrived in post-Civil War America.

We extend globalization so rapidly that frontiers are everywhere--as are new forms of frontiersmen (like South and East Asian "coolies" in vast numbers).

Relax Mr. Turner, the frontier's open for business again (which speaks to my "more states" scenario), and so Mr. Prince's future is quite bright (as is Cofer Black's, as he comes closest to Pinkerton's career morph from spymaster to spy privateer in Blackwater's newest product offering).

As insecurity spreads across all of Waltz's three levels (system, state, individual), so do the resilient responses. Hardly the "end" of anything (John does not sell his sub-title, proving Fallows' foreword about "optimism"--surprising to some but not to me, because I think Fallows sees a lot of Boyd in Robb [a neat lineage link having Fallows write the foreword], and intellectual pioneers are anything but pessimistic, despite their destructive tones regarding outdated paradigms--indeed, they are happy warriors, by and large), but the beginning of something far better.

Robb's book is already performing its function for me: helping to expand the vocabulary and vision, and this is good. I'll read it full next week (John's recommendation on a private-security sector book stands in the way) and I anticipate using it a lot for Vol. III, because it seems like such a strong exploration of the system-individual linkages, so a major accomplishment on John's part.

Collectively, understanding advances and any ingenuity "gaps" (a la Homer-Dixon) prove completely illusory. There are reasons why humans rule this planet, as we weren't just born yesterday.

Now, we have all levels and all sources working security, leaving behind the Cold War's abnormality (truly a suspension of history).

That's why al Qaeda never had a chance, just a forcing function we would have had to create on our own if it had not appeared.

Historical determinism's a bitch, isn't it?!

Thanks to Craig Nordin for sending this.

Allergies killing me, but a nice surprise with spring: only one big tree in the yard looks like a goner. When you carve out a space in the woods, you worry about significant losses of trees, and of the 75 or so in the yard, looks like only one big and one small have passed in this first post-construction year. To me, I see both resiliency and something I don't have to pay for!

This week is lost to working the Esquire piece with Mark, so I'm letting a lot pass on blogging. So much to do on this piece and we're so late.

Neat news from last night though: Esquire won a National Magazine Award for national reporting (C.J. Chivers' amazing piece on Beslan, which won him a Michael Kelly award too). Esquire was nominated for general excellence but did not win this year. Apparently I didn't write enough last year.

Ahem!

I don't think any paper picked it up, and here's why: Scripps' processing of the text screwed up the first para, which is what I think most editors read to see if they're interested in using it. So when they see that screw-up, they back off and the column is effectively orphanned.

Sean and I are trying to get some answers through Knoxville on how Scripps's processing (which I fear is too automated) is misinterpreting some of the coding in the texts I submit. Not sure we can get to the bottom of this (I have never interacted with anyone from Scripps, just Knoxville News), but we're going to try and do our best to avoid the problem in the future, cause it drives me nuts.

You make the effort, and then this happens, and there's no way you personally can fix it.

POST: Globalizations' Win-Win Game

Great blog by Steve on a very misunderstood topic.

ARTICLE: U.S. diplomats returning from Iraq with post-traumatic stress disorder, By Barbara Slavin, USA TODAY, May 1, 2007

ARTICLE: Key US Army ranks begin to thin, By Gordon Lubold, Christian Science Monitor, May 2, 2007

ARTICLE: U.S.-Iran Talks Unlikely at Conference, By Robin Wright, Washington Post, May 2, 2007; Page A11

OP-ED: "The Hail Mary Pass," By Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, May 2, 2007

The first piece shows the SysAdmin stuff, when pursued in the toughest spots (and here, under the toughest circumstances--thanks to Bush), is hard on all involved.

But remember this: It can be done well. It was done well in the former Yugoslavia (when Clinton got around to it), and it's done routinely well in resilient Florida (Remember the summer of 3 successive hurricanes a bit back? I do, because I traveled there repeatedly during that time frame and Florida did just fine). So reducing our current universe to Iraq and Katrina is bogus.

It's an oldie but a goodie: success is a poor teacher, while failure is a great one. Having said that, we need to recognize the wins as well as the losses, and stop pretending the latter defines our ceilings, when it simply marks the floor.

Those situations (as Friedman points out today WRT Iraq) are pure Bush-Cheney-isms, not particularly reflective of America.

This fish, as the old Russian proverb says, begins rotting at the head.

And that's why this upcoming Iraq summit is unlikely to yield much: these guys never admit mistakes (Friedman's dream), meaning one of our biggest difficulties with Iran is how similar our leaderships' styles truly are.

Meanwhile, Yingling's complaints seem born out by Army stats, suggesting the toll of this administration will be great indeed.

But don't extrapolate the entire 21st century from Bush. Too many self-professed strategic thinkers are doing that and it's quite silly.

Life will go on without Bush, and it will move along just fine--much better, in fact.

ARTICLE: CO2 row threatens climate report, By Roger Harrabin, BBC News, 2 May 2007

An old story: the latest to the party resent being told by the first that they can't drink as much. No, they can't be allowed to indulge as much as their predecessors.

You want that differential? You better be prepared to pay for it, as Summers points out.

This story also points out how China's being equated now with more and more of globalization's bad and not just its good.

You rise too much and you get on everybody's radar, and your great coming-out party starts to feel like one nasty pin-the-tail-on-the-dragon game.

Thanks to Pete Johnson for sending this.

ARTICLE: Millions Of Chickens Fed Tainted Pet Food: Risk to Consumers Minimal, FDA Says, By Rick Weiss, Washington Post, May 2, 2007; Page A01

This whole pet food crisis is proving to be quite the interesting System Perturbation--and not necessarily in a minor key.

Pet food industry gets pinged.
China gets pinged.
Poultry industry gets pinged.

Who's next?

New rules clearly in the making. Know your biological/supply chain clearly in the offing.

And the bar just gets raised higher.

Obvious observation?

It's the screw-ups that generate the new rules far more often than the terrorists.

A bogus argument you often hear: we have to be right all the time, but the terrorist only needs to be right once.

Truth is, we need to be right all the time because, if we're not, too much crap like this crisis results. By and large, the terrorists are lost in the noise.

ARTICLE: FDA appoints Acheson food-safety czar, By Gregory Lopes, THE WASHINGTON TIMES, May 2, 2007

Naturally, we get the "czar" as our public-face answer. That's mostly for show.

The real answers come in the new rules imposed internationally (regimes), nationally (regulations), by industry (standards), and within companies themselves (new performance metrics)--that and the monitoring and detection systems that accompany them.

Making all those rules work together?

That's what Enterra Solutions does.

We're a business that sees opportunities in System Perturbations--thus my obvious intellectual and career attraction to the company.

Thanks to Chad Laux for sending this.

ARTICLE: "At Lonely Iraq Outpost, GIs Stay As Hope Fades U.S. Soldiers Persevere Despite Snipers, Ambush," By Greg Jaffe, Wall Street Journal, May 3, 2007, Pg. 1

ARTICLE: "Sunni Muslim Sheikhs Join US In Fighting Al Qaeda: Iraqi tribal support is linked to drop in violence in Anbar Province," By Sam Dagher, Christian Science Monitor, May 3, 2007, Pg. 1

You know how much I admire Greg's ability to capture ground truth, so this is some depressing news out of Iraq.

You know, there are various ways to speed the inevitable killing in Iraq. Some work better with our presence, others without. As we remain unable to muster the sufficient number of troops through allies (we don't do diplomacy, remember?), I think it's time to try the latter route so as to incentivize the Saudis and Iranians and Syrians to more malleable positions.

And yeah, I barely distingush between the three.

I don't think forcing the function of sectarian violence precludes efforts against al Qaeda, and even if it does, al Qaeda would quickly get lost in the noise, so I take less solace than most about success in enlisting Sunni help against al Qaeda. I don't think that "enemy" constitutes our biggest problem in Iraq right now.

ARTICLE: "Lawmakers Decry Iran-India Alliance: Leaders Warn of Damage to Nuclear Deal," By Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, May 3, 2007; Page A15

Trying to break India from Iran will work about as well as trying to break China from Iran.

We look at this so myopically. Ask yourself what it would take for the U.S. to ditch the House of Saud? Well, India and China view Iran's rising role in their energy security in similar ways: a very useful hedge against uncertainty. Our behavior toward Iran and the Middle East in general cannot help but give both New Delhi and Beijing serious pause, so expecting them to abandon their best hedge is really naive, in my opinion.

He did a masterful job. I see my reporting and writing everywhere, but somehow it's transformed by his editing from a guy trying to sound like a reporter to one who actually does.

Mark really is amazingly good at what he does.

One problem: big piece is missing from original text, so we're talking about how to re-insert. Question of size. Sits at just over 6,200 now and we're talking a big graphic element, so this is an issue way beyond my pay-grade.

Feel so much better now that I see it. I was sweating this one a lot. Very hard to do justice to all the reporting, much less the topic, but I think we're getting what needs to be gotten: the essence of the dynamics, rendered in narrative.

It's weird, but with each reported story (already I consider the next one now that the scary part of the labor is over and the baby's out and breathing) I get so much better at the gathering and anguish so much more over the writing.

I imagine this is a standard evolution.

Andy wrote in with this question:

I found this article about the ethics of our Army and USMC in the combat zones very worrisome.

Since Iraq is effectively not under any sense of control, do you think that a pistol-packin' Peace Corps would be doing any better? Or would we have the same mess, just different players? Or did Bush & Co. bring this on by failing to plan for the nation-building?

And what does this bode for future actions (such as Somalia/Darfur, Iran, etc)?

Thanks and keep up the good work

Tom's reply:

Ethics are a function of danger: less danger, expect higher ethics, and more danger, expect less ethics (more or less being very relative concepts, in this regard--as in, those who've been there can tell you about it and those who haven't, can't really describe it fairly). Those who find that basic relationship hard to wrap their mind around I would guess have never spent any time in a combat zone.

I mean, there's like and there's love. There's peace and there's war. There's basketball and there's football. In some venues, what's considered "fair" is considered pretty bad in others. You want better ethics, you make the better venue happen.

We have not done that in Iraq, and we've done that huge misdeed to both ourselves and the Iraqi people.

Danger is clearly related to nature of presence: more overwhelming the presence, far less the danger. Compare the Balkans to Iraq.

So I don't find these numbers particularly troubling or conclusive regarding any future nation-building effort. They simply reflect the difficult tactical, operational and strategic conditions under which this administration has forced our military to engage postwar Iraq.

You want it bad, you get it bad.

I just can't pick up a newspaper, and I just feel no impetus to blog.

It's like the screen popped up and demanded a "restart."

Part of it was getting through the Esquire piece, which I now realize was easier than I thought, primarily because Warren is Warren. It's amazing to see him take about 15,000 words (when all is said and done) and turn it into a little over 6k. He's pulling from fore and aft and everything just falls into place, like some Rubik's Cube he can put together blind-folded. You sit next to him, watching, and you can't believe he can do it. It seemed so complex to you just a few minutes ago, and he's rationalized the whole thing in a few days (often working late into the night, which I can't manage, as I am a morning writer and an evening reader).

Part of it is roughly 100 flights so far this year, and more hotel rooms than I can remember, which are really starting to creep me out (there is something so amazingly random about sleeping in strange places all the time, and my trips are so classically three nights at three different hotels).

Part of it is the inevitably ramping up of requirements from the kids as they grow up.

Part of it is simply realizing you stay connected to your spouse or you lose her inevitably.

Part of it is that I'm naturally an introvert who needs a lot of downtime.

But I'm sensing the biggest part is that build-up before the storm of creativity. I really feel the need to write this book welling up.

Then I think: Good God man! You've cranked three 6k-plus articles this year (one sitting with Esquire for consideration), plus a column every week, plus the blog. And you did all that travel.

You're just tired.

Last Saturday I tried to play Joe Homeowner really fast by spraying all the weeds. Jumping under the deck, I did my best crab walk, hyperextending my right knee, so I've had the opportunity to limp all this week, feeling very middle-aged.

That wears on you some, but it also focuses the mind: What do you want to do?

I want to write that book.

I don't want to try and parent kids at roughly 15 minutes a week.

I don't want to lose track of my marriage.

I'd someday like to be the U.S. ambassador to China.

I want to die somewhere other than Earth.

I want to maintain deep friendships with people I care about, like Steve and Mark and others.

I want religious faith like I had when I was 12 years old, and served maybe 300 times a year.

I want to understand the passage of time better.

I want to effect a worldwide revolution in thinking about war and peace.

I want my own luxury box at Lambeau.

I want to do a show on Broadway.

I want to play hundreds of rounds of golf with my sons, later with my adopted daughters.

I want to want what I've got instead of getting what I want (my favorite Sheryl Crow line).

I want to read books about Teddy Roosevelt.

I want to hold more babies.

I want to resume playing the piano like it's the most important thing in my life, which it will never be, but I wanna play like it is.

I think that's it.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Reboot complete.

ARTICLE: New Delhi Wants To Buy Lockheed C-130Js From U.S., By VIVEK RAGHUVANSHI, DefenseNews.com,05/03/07

The perfect SysAdmin military sale: C-130s, as I learned on a very remote and short strip in Kenya in March, are great at landing where other planes cannot.

This is exactly the sort of stuff we want to sell India. But watch it get screwed up in Congress for all sorts of stupid reasons--meaning nukes.

Thanks to Pete Johnson for sending this.

ARTICLE: "Presidential Pick in Turkey Is Sign Of a Rising Middle Class," by Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times, 25 April 2007, p. A1.

ARTICLE: "Turkish Islamists Hope to Ride Competence to Victory: To the secular elite, politicking can seem like demeaning work," by Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times, 4 May 2007, p. A3.

MEMO: "In Turkey, Fear and Discomfort About Religious Life: 'Even if Erdogan walked on water, the secularists wouldn't trust him," by Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times, 30 April 2007, p. A4.

We are watching Europe's future in Turkey: Islamists from the middle class who present themselves as competent administrators of a modern state that nonetheless--in their mind--needs more religion--you know, the Republicans.

And you know, there really isn't anything wrong with that, so long as your religion ends where it bumps into my political freedoms.

I know, I know. Easier said than done.

The real fear here, of course, of state-imposed religious strictures--again, not that different from America, is it? They just focus on what women wear, while we focus on pregnancies. So yeah, we're further down the road, but it's the same road.

To succeed without triggering the military coup (Turkey's rather crude Supreme Court), Islamists need to show they can rule without prejudice, that at the end of the day the law stands supreme and that law is secular.

But make no mistake, we will see the yin-yang pull played out in Europe in the future, with both sides evincing far less maturity than we're seeing here, so scarier before it gets calmer.

ARTICLE: "Saying No To Penelope: Father Seeks Experimental Cancer Drug, But a Biotech Firm Says Risk Is Too High," by Greta Anand, Wall Street Journal, 1 May 2007, p. A1.

When you have sufficient plenty, the politics become all about access to technology. When you don't, it's still all about technology (with nukes being the least useful, compared to stuff like drug patents and IT connectivity).

So no matter what the socio-economic level, it's first and foremost about technology. That's what drives the connectivity, and the connectivity is what drives the new and competing and destabilizing identity wars.

People want the modern but also the old. They want to advance but retain that which they see as sacred.

The story of the sick child is just a very pure expression of when push comes to shove, there's no limit on disposable income.

ARTICLE: "Terrorist Attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan Rose Sharply Last Year, State Department Says: Where American troops are deployed, terrorism has risen," by Scott Shane, New York Times, 1 May 2007, p. A10.

"Japanese kamikazes appear to attack more where U.S. warships are concentrated: Intelligence experts describe 'failure' of U.S. Strategy"

Terrorism is up globally last year, except Iraq and Afghanistan account for the vast bulk of the increase.

So we're losing right? Or are we just engaging?

So international terrorism rules the world, except fewer die globally than from guns in the U.S. (30k to a mere 20k from terror). Don't even get me started on global crime gun deaths.

See what I mean about not rising above the noise?

Arquilla has a weird quote for such a smart guy. He says "these statistics suggest that our war on global terrorism is not going very well."

Hmmmm.

30k gun deaths in U.S. population of 300m versus global deaths from terror at 20k in a population of 6.5 billion!

Yes, we must be losing.

Terrorism is totally out of control and terrorists clearly run the world. That's why the global economy is expanding at an unprecedented rate.

ARTICLE: "Handicapping With Optimism," by Benedict Carey, New York Times, 1 May 2007, p. A21.

The more optimistic candidate wins 80 percent of the time since 1900.

A measuring system from academics says Hillary is most optimistic (the Bill influence), then Obama. McCain, Romney, Edwards and Giuliani.

But frankly she's the only one who skews heavy to optimism.

Not sure on how they measure (based on words uttered versus delivery), because I think Rudy and Barack deliver optimistically, as does Romney, even if words don't indicate as much.

Still, I'm a big believer on this--naturally.

ARTICLE: "Overture to an untapped market: Advertisers Rewrite the Rules for Reaching Muslims," by Louise Story, New YorkTimes, 28 April 2007, p. B1.

It ain't about diversity or respect for religious differences. It's about the money.

Crass to some, beautiful to me.

The best form of color-blind.

"Star Wars" America should really be buying

With North Korea and Iran achieving nuclear status, Americans naturally fear the rising potential for nuclear terrorism. As many presidential candidates point out, our ports remain unacceptably unsafe. But America needs more than just a firewall on its border. It needs defense in depth when it comes to detecting nuclear materials.

That I should make this argument more than five years after 9/11 is emblematic of our great failure of imagination since that tragic day, which turned far too much of our efforts and attention inward instead of outward. This is too narrow a perspective in a globalized world, where every nation is only as secure as every other nation to which it is connected by networks and trade.

Read on at Scripps Howard
(Still waiting on KnoxNews)

Matt (MountainRunner) sent this to me earlier this week. Then Mark (ZenPundit) put his up, so I figured it was time to keep up with the Joneses ;-)

The service is statisfy: real-time display of who's reading your weblog around the world.

Here's Tom's page if you want to check it out.

Binghamton, NY, thanks for reading.

Manassas, VA, I see that hand.

One more, then I'm done: Cambridge, MA. Tom's old PhD stomping grounds.

Enjoy.

ARTICLE: Giuliani backs Army buildup nearing 600K, By JIM DAVENPORT, Associated Press, May 5, 2007

Good sign from Rudy. Especially like the war-peace quote:

"We need to not only win the war, we have to win the peace as well."

ARTICLE: "Phones studied as attack detector: U.S. Says cells could warn of toxic agents," by Mimi Hall, USA Today, 4-6 May 2007, p. 1A.

Not pie in the sky whatsoever. Already being done to track and manage traffic.

Fears of privacy?

What if you could get warnings from your cells on all these dangers?

Or peer-to-peer warnings from others?

Worth it to you then?

ARTICLE: "A Separate Peace: Kurds are cultivating their own bonds with the United States," by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 30 April-6 May 2007, p. 7

Enterra just sent over its first personnel to Kurdistan on its first Development-in-a-Box contract with the US Government. All one can ask for is an incentivized target and the Kurds are definitely that.

Kurdistan markets itself like pork: the "other white meat."

The 30-second television commercial features stirring scenes of a young Iraqi boy high-fiving a U.S. soldier, a Westerner dining alfresco, and men and women dancing together. "Have you seen the other Iraq?" the narrator asks. "It's spectacular. It's joyful."

"Welcome to Iraqi Kurdistan," the narrator continues. "It's not a dream. It's the other Iraq.".

Slick as s--t, no?

You gotta love this sort of democracy in action:

With Sunni and Shiite Arabs locked in a bloody sectarian war, Iraq's Kurds are promoting their interests through an influence-buying campaign in the United States that includes airing nationwide television advertisements, hiring powerful Washington lobbyists and playing parts of the U.S. government against one another.

Their model for a strategic and institutional relationship with the U.S.: Israel and Taiwan.

Now that's brilliant.

Think about it: protection despite lacking certain international recognition.

The Kurds believe they should be recognized as a certifiable success story in a war that has lasted more than four years. They're largely secular, no U.S. military personnel have been killed in Kurdistan since the March 2003 invasion, and business is booming in Irbil and other Kurdish cities because Kurdish militias, known as peshmerga, have managed to keep out Sunni Arab insurgents.

Yugoslavia didn't fall into place in a day. It did so in sequential chunks. Recognizing Kurdistan-the-success is crucial to keeping the Big Bang sequential instead of cumulative.

Take what the board gives you, I say.

And pull most U.S. troops eventually back to Kurdistan. Don't leave Iraq, but stay where you're welcome and accept a certain commute for certain necessary activities.

Grow some lawn and stop only killing weeds. Then let others see where the grass is greener.

Demonstration effects make globalization go round.

ARTICLE: "America the Fertile," by Nicholas Eberstadt, Washington Post, 6 May 2007, p. B7.

Great piece on what keeps America so exceptional. This theme was a big one in Stuart Varney's opening keynote at a Richmond Events CIO conference where I speak today as the other keynoter. Varney bragged about being both an immigrant and father of six. I may someday lay claim to six kids, and at least half will be immigrants. So I guess it works either way. Other than that, I'd just like Stuart's bank account (when he took over "Moneyline," CNN made him sell all his stocks--just before the tech crash).

Big point of this piece: the US moves dramatically away from rest of Old Core, or West, first and foremost in demographics (which, as Varney pointed out. keeps us young and accepting of change). We just keep adding people (immigration) and having babies (not just immigrants, but our core stock of "Anglos" or "whites" are much higher in fertility than Europe or Japan).

By 2025, Eberstadt points out, Europe will be shrinking and we'll still be adding almost 3m a year. We'll have the highest growth rate then among developed countries and sport one of the lowest median ages. We'll also be the only sizable developed country where the kids still outnumber seniors.

The kicker:

Such trends might reinforce U.S. international prominence--even though the divergence in demographic profiles between the United States and the other developed countries may also portend an era of diminishing affinities between the United States and its historical Western allies.

Bingo!

Another guy connects the dots on that one.

So with whom does America align itself in this frontier age of globalization?

You know the answer.

ARTICLE: "Pacific security called key for Asia: Pacific Fleet leader Adm. Gary Roughead will head Fleet Forces Command in Virginia," By Gregg K. Kakesako, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, May 6, 2007

Glad to see Roughead move from head of Pacific Fleet to Fleet Forces Command. He was great out in Pac, a truly visionary leader who saw the big picture and acted on it. Having him as boss force provider for the entire Navy will be great, pushing naval forces into the SysAdmin directions it needs to go. Yes, stay the preeminent blue-water navy on the planet, but also reconnect to a globalized world where transparency on the high seas is everything.

There's trying to find needles in haystacks and then there's having the capacity to watch the haystack get built.

Roughead's office at PACFLT is very cool. His secretary uses Nimitz's old desk from WWII and his artifacts are everywhere.

When I was there with Kevin a year ago, the Admiral gave him a command coin, which Kev still treasures (he's got one from Gen. Doug Brown too, longtime head of SOCOM , who I think steps down soon).

Again, a good move for Navy.

+ Far East Cynic linked The State of the World.
+ So did Fraters Libertas.
+ So did Naval Open Source Intelligence.

+ Wide Ruin linked Tom's Pop!Tech talk.
+ So did Seeker Blog.

+ ZenPundit linked The son's criticism hurts.
+ And linked The State of the World: Author's Commentary Track.

+ Sheng-Wei Wang quoted BFA.
+ TM Lutas linked Good pipelines make good neighbors--eventually.
+ tdaxp linked Revisiting the System Perturbation argument on breaking global drug patents.
+ I Am Net-Centric linked Still optimistic on China.
+ You won't believe this! Redstate thinks Tom's wrong on Obama! ;-)
+ The Nimble Books Blog linked, what else? Book numbers.
+ Shloky linked Duh! Where we engage the enemy, they seem to attack more! In their preferred way!
+ Erkan's field diary linked The curious case of Turkey's Islamist middle class.
+ World and Global Politics Blog linked The far-too-successful nation-building that is Kurdistan.
+ Big Lizards referred to the Core and PNM.
+ Defense News referred to System Perturbations and PNM, but, sadly, it's subscriber only (I saw it on ERMB).

ARTICLE: Sarkozy Wins, Vows to Restore Pride in France, By John Ward Anderson and Molly Moore, Washington Post, May 7, 2007; Page A01

I think this is a great thing, especially as the son of an East European immigrant. France desperately needs to rejoin reality (by 2020, more than half of France will be over 55 years old) and the world desperately needs France to rejoin it (France obstructs progress in so many Core-Gap integration issues).

You've got Merkel in Germany, Sarkozy now in France, Brown soon in the UK and anybody soon in the US and I think the West's leadership is seriously upgraded (with Blair to Brown hopefully not being too much of a step down).

France has become recently what Poland always was for me as a kid growing up: the butt of all jokes. After 12 years of Chirac, his main accomplishment seemed to be making France the much derided laughingstock of the world.

Hopefully that goes away very quickly with a serious adult now in charge.

ARTICLE: "How Big a Stretch? For Barack Obama, Winning the White House Would Mean Bridging The Biggest Gap Of All," By Lynne Duke, Washington Post, May 7, 2007; Page C01

Seriously, for me, the attraction to Obama is: 1) generational, and 2) a sense of competency and vision.

As for the underlying question of "Is white America evolved enough to elect a black man president?" I find that sentence alone weirdly racial. Obama's half black and half white, so continuing to view him as "limited" somehow politically by his blackness seems so last century (the queer "one drop" rule).

If you want to go that route and make such arguments, then try this one on for size: Obama's the first black who's seriously qualified for the job. No one who ran before could be viewed so, either because the appeal was limited (Jordan was never believable, like electing your stern, lecturing aunt), the platform too narrow (Chisolm simply had no national standing, a la Kucinich she was a fanciful symbol), the candidate too weird (Jackson was and remains a Perot-like egomaniac without enough reliability) or the character too questionable (Brown was always the accidental candidate who lucked out).

Obama's serious because he covers all the bases, like any credible candidate does: great platform, great message, great appeal, great delivery, seems competent--the whole nine yards. His problem is that Hillary hits on all cylinders too, which makes the generational appeal perhaps the differential.

But I stick to some doubts on him, in that I still see him as JFK '56 and not quite yet JFK '60, so I think he'll run as Veep, like Kennedy almost did in 1956.

ARTICLE: "Teaching Recent History From Opposite Perspectives: At Georgetown, It's Feith vs. Tenet and Policy vs. Intelligence," By Dafna Linzer, Washington Post, May 7, 2007; Page A17

Georgetown seriously needs to rethink how it attracts talent: Feith versus Tenet? "Dumbest f--king guy on the planet" versus just plain pathetic is more like it.

Feith was a total abuser of power while Tenet was a major league shirker of responsibility (spare me the courage of speaking out in your memoir, buddy, because we weren't paying you for that--were we?-- when you were CIA boss).

Is it just me, or isn't it weird how we all think intell is broken as an institution and yet everytime these guys individually go public with books, they're instantly treated as soothsaying geniuses?

If they're all that great, why don't we have better intell? Why don't we do better against terrorists?

Oh yes, I forget: system did it to them, politicians did it to them, and all their successes are never publicized.

Or we just swallow this BS whole.

Thank you sir, but I don't want another!

BULK EMAIL from Newt Gingrich

"In addition, I have long argued for the creation of a much larger military. Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are all on record calling for a bigger army. The White House should answer their calls now. We can't wait until 2009."

Newt's website: American Solutions

Yes, Newt has wanted his SysAdmin going back to 1999, with Hart-Rudman.

I've named the concept a lot of things over my career, starting with the Transitioneers back in 1992, to the Department of Network Security in 2000 to SysAdmin in 2001 to the Department of Everything Else in 2004.

I have never been alone in this idea, nor was I anywhere the first to push it (the SysAdmin's heyday started June 7th, 1944, or D-Day +1), so when anyone embraces it, they are welcomed to the growing fold.

It was always a matter of time and pain.

Thanks to HVBoeziIII for sending this.

ARTICLE: US and China tug at ASEAN unity, By Michael Vatikiotis, Asia Times Online, May 8th, 2007

Waiting on this argument/analysis for a long time.

ASEAN grows, cooperation gets more complex, and just when it needs mulitlateralist impulses from within and without, along with a strategic vision for Asia's security/economic integration (to keep pace with NATO and EU), along come both the unimaginative Chinese and clumsy Americans all hooting and hollering about why "you need a much stronger bilat with me!"

This is a pointless contest that--ultimately--we cannot win.

We can only leapfrog and simultaneously jumpstart it by making the East Asian NATO happen ASAP, thus negating a choice that no one in Asia wants to make: between their favorite final assembler and their favorite customer.

Another example of what having two Bush terms costs us: delay.

Thanks to Rob Johnson for sending this.

ARTICLE: Mapping the electronic jihad, By Rebecca Givner-Forbes and Clay Shwery, RSIS, April 25th, 2007

This is Olivier Roy's point about jihad fighting fire with fire: they globalize the movement to fight globalization.

Yes, in the short term it advantages their asymmetrical warfare approach. But here is where they lose: unable to disable globalization (forget the West and America, the Asians will simply not allow it), they increasingly lure the boy out of the country into the big bad world, and you know what?

That's an irreversible process that kills jihad over time.

So, no, they never did have a chance. The only questions remaining are time and pain.

Watch the brilliant "Ashes and Diamonds" (Poland's greatest film) and you'll know what I mean.

And yes, it won't be a fair fight. It was never going to be.

Thanks to Craig Nordin.

ARTICLE: Turkish-Kurdish Dispute Tests U.S. Strategic Alliances, By Karen DeYoung, Washington Post, May 8, 2007; Page A17

For our alliance with both to work, we've got to give the Kurds enough independence so that they crack down on PKK themselves.

ARTICLE: National Guard deals with less equipment, BY DION LEFLER, The Wichita Eagle, May 8th, 2007

The right System Perturbation will inevitably come along and reveal the growing gaps.

This is a tertiary cost of not having enough allies in Iraq.

ARTICLE: NATO paces Afghan offensive, By Philip Smucker, THE WASHINGTON TIMES, May 8, 2007

Grow some lawn instead of always killing weeds.

Ireland tamed Northern Ireland, and the Brit military just bought time.

The power of example + exhaustion.

ARTICLE: U.S. Debates Deterrence for Nuclear Terrorism, By DAVID E. SANGER and THOM SHANKER, New York Times, May 8, 2007

Classic example of a solution trying to find the right problem.

So OBE it hurts, but such is the state of strategic thinking in America today: using past-era tools for next-era problems.

Deterrence was great while it lasted and lasts now only where it's most often completely unneeded.

Yes, some spots where it's still key (India-Pak) and where it might soon be key (Israel-Iran), but it won't solve the global guerrillas challenge Robb describes.

ARTICLE: China to Send Military Unit to Darfur, By Edward Cody, Washington Post, May 8, 2007

China stepping up. This is so much better than shaming Beijing into withdrawal. we want them to show responsibility on the ground, not disengage or reduce Sudan's meager current connectivity to the global economy.

That's the best way to transform the "genocide Olympics" (Western, do-nothing, know-nothing hypocisy at it's worst) into something better--like China-the-emerging-SysAdmin/peacekeeping-force-of-globalization ("We own our connectivity").

What is our military really doing to encourage this? What is our government doing? Virtually nothing.

So yeah, Mia Farrow gets more credit on this one than talking-point Condi does.

Thanks to Chris Mewett for sending this.

Gordon Matthew wrote:

Some background on Paul Yingling's piece. It's illuminating to read this interview with LTC Yingling from last Fall. Gives a broader sense of where he's coming from, and how congruent his ideas are with your own.

Tom writes:

Read for yourself and see if you agree.

I've been waiting on the Yinglings to appear. To outsiders, it seems like it's taken forever, but if you spent your life working with this crowd, you realize this is as fast as it could have appeared.

Very hard thing to do, but very courageous.

When I emailed him, Gordon was scrupulous to note that he had picked up the interview link from Small Wars Journal. When I went over there to look for it, top post is by Yingling himself, newly minted SWJ member.

(It was the SWJ Editor who linked the interview in their forum thread on the generalship article, by the way.)

What does it say about a guy that he posts a picture of himself getting his ass kicked? Call it, also, a metaphor.

POST: An Overview of Kurdistan

Steve DeAngelis, blogging out of Kurdistan, gives us some great history and background on the Kurds.

Not a book review, but more just my impressions. I just hate doing surveys of books.

Just finished Robb's book, "Brave New War," and I liked it for where it succeeds brilliantly (tactical and operational descriptions of the emerging threats, which Robb views as ascendant and which I view as just what's left over) and forgive it where it succeeds least (he doesn't sell me on the death of either nation-states nor globalization--the ultimate open-source network--in large part because he can't adequately define "win" and "defeat" in his rather expansive statements about global guerrillas declaring wars on states and even the world and "winning."

I mean, other than the nutty Salafi jihadists, who want to go feudal and pre-market, every other group John cites as successful tends to imitate your basic nation-state the first chance they get (or the first territory they can control), so how is that a "defeat" of nation-states? Even the "proto-states" and "states-within-states" suggest that the Gap suffers from too little statehood (as in, they need more, smaller states) than too much, so I guess I just see the need to remap the post-colonial Gap where John sees the end of the Westphalian Era.

When I read the book, it reminded me a lot of reading Karl Marx's stuff: stunningly concise and elegant on the dissection of current vulnerabilities created by technology's advance and its revolutionary impact on economics, plus good analysis of a growing gap between those developments and the political means we currently possess to manage that change. But, like Marx, John becomes too sweeping in his generalizations of why our current system is doomed to collapse and is basically incapable of reform, plus his prescriptions at the end trail off in a vague sort of way that's unsatisfying, like reading Marx's dream of a post-capitalist world that wistfully reconstructs much of the pre-capitalist world's charms (John's version of a resilient future utopia is a global society built around the same, bottom-up principles of the Internet, which makes it pleasantly communitarian in a way no one would resist--at least no one who grew up in a small town like I did).

John's book is deeply informed by the fact he's a serious technocrat who distrusts politics. Indeed, politics as any form of solution is basically missing in action in this book. When it's referred to glancingly here and there, it's always to catalogue dysfunction or corruption (e.g., America's entire political system is dismissed with a reference to Jack Abramoff's ability to purchase it at will--a blanketing statement which comes off as strangely naive in its cynicism, but that's not unusual for military guys who often describe Washington like it's some modern-day Sodom). Big entities of all sorts are dismissed in this way by Robb, whereas the heroes and change-agents are always outsiders, "guerrillas" (an all-purpose term to John, like "connectivity" is to me) and small entrepreneurs and start-up companies.

That bias shouldn't surprise: it's basically John's career talking. So his heroes come from his experience and ranks: they're the proles of this revolution who are going to inherit the earth the rest of "them" created but can no longer control.

So, like Marx, whom I consider to be one of the great conceptualizing geniuses of his age, I like John for his obvious and stunning strengths (the dissection of now), trust him less on his projections (he sees primarily the bad in all of this networking and tends to believe in only wholesale reshaping from below to achieve the better), and basically dismiss his dismissal that change cannot be made within existing structures: political, corporate and--yes--even hierarchical ones. I think that, like Marx, John vastly underestimates the role of political institutions in positive change and their capacity for adaptation.

My synthesis tends to be additive (politics and markets are all about adaptation and compromise, so every new thing helps), while John's is more destructively revolutionary, like Marx (the brittle old order must die and be replaced by a new, technocratically-tinged order that's vastly different in form and function).

I think John's dissection of guerrillas inside the Gap is very powerful, but that when he cites--by extrapolation--similar capacities for system disruptions and system perturbations in the advanced world, he doesn't prove his case very well. Again, to me, his argument there reminds me of Marx's description of capitalism getting to a certain stage and then just collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. Keeping a failed state failed is not the same as crippling a functioning state with a growing economy. If it were, they'd be revolutions going on all over the Core regularly, when in reality change and adaptation is achieved more smoothly than John believes any nation-state capable of, even following huge expansions of techno